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Symbian, which already supports Java, C++, Python, Flash Lite, Silverlight, and .NET among others, now adds Ruby, with an app dev kit designed to broaden support among developers.

LONDON — Symbian has announced the release of Ruby for the Symbian OS, enabling developers to use the Ruby language to create applications for Symbian-based handsets and devices.

At the Symbian Smartphone Show here, Symbian announced that Symbian Research and Pragmaticomm have collaborated to provide the availability of Ruby v1.9 for Symbian OS. And Symbian is releasing Ruby for Symbian OS to the open source software developer community.

According to the notes accompanying the release, Symbian officials said:

"Ruby is a powerful dynamic language that reaches the heights of the pure Object Oriented Programming paradigm and gives a wealth of language features like exceptions, blocks, closures, regular expressions, collections, meta-classing and much more. Ruby is enjoying a growing popularity in different developer communities."

YOU ARE INVITED TO HAVE TEA WITH THE QUEEN ON SUNDAY.
PLEASE BRING YOUR VERY BEST MANNERS.

Even little girls who dream of lifting a pinkie with royalty need some education in etiquette, and Ruby is no exception.
When she finds an elaborate invitation to tea on Sunday next, Ruby is ecstatic! Immediately she yells out her good news to the mailman who just delivered the envelope.

"Ruby, I hope you won’t shout when you have tea with the Queen," he laughs.

Ruby races into her house where her brother is reclining on the sofa with his iPod, jumps on the sofa as she tells him her news, and spills his popcorn all over the floor.

"Ruby, I hope you won’t interrupt when you have tea with Queen!" he grumbles.

Undaunted by his complaints, Ruby runs for the playground, jumping ahead of the line to announce her good fortune from the top of the slide.

"Ruby, I hope you will wait your turn when you have tea with the Queen!" her friends grouse.

Ruby spreads her good news during a performance at Mr. Roy’s Puppet Farm, rushes into her ballet class to spread the word without her ballet costume, and yells out her tale to her weary dad before he can get in the door in the evening.

"Ruby, I hope you will remember to welcome people when you have tea with the Queen," he counsels.

Ruby’s biggest faux pas of the day comes when she tell her news at dinner.
"BIVE BLIN BLIGHTED DOO BLAV BLEE BLIV BLEE FLEEN" she announces with a full mouth, spewing spaghetti everywhere, from her hair to her family’s plates.

"Ruby, I hope you won’t talk with your mouth full and won’t tip your chair back and will use your fork and napkin when you have tea with the Queen!"

At last the big day comes. Pampered and primped and presumably with her best manners at the ready, Ruby and her mother drive sedately to–her grandmother’s house. There on the porch is a large banner which reads "WELCOME TO TEA AT THE PALACE!"
"My princess!" welcomes Grandma, and the tea party is a huge success.
Oh, and Ruby even remembers to send "the Queen" a very polite thank-you note.

Dear Grandma,
Thank you so much for inviting me to tea. I tried to use my best manners. The treats were delicious, but my favorite thing was just being with you.
I love you,
Ruby

Normally I’m not a big fan of celebrity authors, but after all, Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson should know a thing or two about having tea with the Queen, and her advice on etiquette is good even if you never tip a teacup at Windsor Palace. The chief attractions here, however, are the exuberantly elegant illustrations of Robin Preiss Glasser

I started programming seriously roughly ten years ago. I was working in the call center of an ISP, and there was a need for a reseller tracking application. I was attending the local community college at the time, and had been indoctrinated into the world of computer programming trhough what amounted to vocational training in Visual Basic and Microsoft Access. Fortunately, the ISP was a Linux shop, and a few employees were nice enough to introduce me to the basic philosophy of Linux and assist in learning some rudimentary shell commands.

One of these employees was a Perl hacker, and he assisted in convincing the company to form a small team of three programmers to tackle the programming job. I was lucky enough to be chosen for the position, and to be frank, after having spent a few months in the call center, I would have considered janitorial duties a promotion. The only problem was that I didn’t know Perl. I quickly ran to the nearest bookstore, grabbed a copy of Learning Perl, and set to work learning the language. A week later, I was neck deep in the project and thankfully had an experienced programmer to lead me through my first big job. The project was a success, and the team became a permanent fixture at the company.

What impressed me so much about Perl was the succintness, mneumonic friendliness, and consistency of the language. After a few weeks of intense study, I could perform the majority of my daily programming tasks from memory and rarely needed to consult a reference.

A year or so later, PHP hit the scene. With the huge buzz surrounding the language, I figured there had to be something really groundbreaking going on. The team I was working on chose to build a large project in PHP, and once again, I set out in earnest to learn the language. This time, things weren’t so easy. While Perl had “sunk in” right away, PHP lacked the natural abstraction I had come to love about Perl. As an example, I didn’t understand why PHP needed sixteen sort methods (sort, arsort, asort, krsort, ksort, natsort, natcasesort, rsort, usort, array_multisort, uasort, uksort, dbx_sort, imap_sort, ldap_sort, yaz_sort) while Perl only needed one. The database methods lacked the wonderful platform independence of DBI, and a lot of other things felt redundant. Mostly though, I disliked the way the language encouraged mixing interface with your implementation. At the time, the PHP website frequently featured examples interpsersing functions and HTML and even touted this ability as a “language feature”.

Progressing through my courses, I ended up taking a class on object oriented design. I learned about the model view controller architectural pattern and immediately saw it’s advantages as a design strategy. I learned the basics of object oriented programming with Perl, but I was dissatisfied with the way it was implemented. I spent a considerable amount of effort learning Java and later Python. I found both languages to be “good enough” in the way they possessed a healthy amount of easily accessible OOP goodness, but I missed the fluidity of programming in Perl and neither ever became a “favorite”.

At this point I was working at an environmental laboratory, and I was given complete freedom to use whatever technology I wanted to solve the problems at hand. I was tasked with writing a data analysis and computation software for an ICAP (Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma Spectrometer), and I was again at a crossroads. An article on Slashdot had drawn my attention to the Ruby programming language, and I found an excellent book that was freely available online. Reading the introductory walkthrough section, I was immediately impressed by the fact that literally everything in the language was an object. The core language was incredibly consistent, concise, and well documented with absolutely no cruft. All of the wonderful Perl idioms I’d come to know and love were right there at my fingertips; albiet, in a more readable fashion. I was sold.

I learned the language and developed the project simultaneously. This was long before Rails was even a whisper in the programming world, so I rolled my own MVC style framework containing a presentation layer that used a combination of XML, eruby templates, and LaTeX. This made it easy for the app to generate both HTML and PDF documents on a whim. The development cycle was fast, the project was finished ahead of time, and everybody loved the final product. Later I wrote a C extension for Ruby to easily access the Win32 serial port allowing an archaic lab instrument to dump data straight to an OpenOffice spreadsheet. I’d never considered writing a C extension to any other language, but again, Ruby made it easy.

Since then, Ruby on Rails has rolled onto the scene and has allowed me to develop projects in which I would have needed a team in the past. MVC is the core paradigm and being able to use my favorite language alongside my favorite architectural pattern is nothing short of a godsend as a web developer. I’ve used Rails to develop web applications on the fast track and have brought in a nice supplementary income doing so. Best of all, I feel good about the final product when writing a Rails app knowing I’m developing in a standardized way where another programmer will be able to come along later and easily maintain the work I’ve done. There are MVC frameworks for PHP, but there’s still no de facto standard way to roll a PHP app. This makes every PHP app a “special surprise” when you look under the hood. Sadly, the surprise isn’t always pleasant.

I’m not saying you can’t write good code in PHP. Actually, working at Grooveshark has shown me that it’s possible to write extremely clean code in PHP, but I still run to the PHP manual several times a day to lookup one of it’s 3000+ core method signatures.

I’m acutely aware that languages are like religions among developers and that everyone has their favorite for one reason or another. I’m also certain there are people out there that would disagree with some of the arguments I’ve made here. Arguments aside, if you’re looking for a new language to learn, and you haven’t tried Ruby, take a look, and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at all that it has to offer.

In light of the current global financial meltdown, Darryl Taft of eWeek has posted a great article: Can Ruby, Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?

In the piece, Darryl asks whether “specialty coding skills will help developers ride out the financial crisis”—specifically, are Ruby on Rails developers better prepared to deal with financial uncertainty? Like many of the other folks quoted in the article, our belief is that for the most part, Ruby on Rails developers are in great shape to weather the storm. Why?

First of all, while we fully expect some CIOs to delay or cancel some internal IT projects. Rails shops are built to do more with less. It’s part of our DNA to be more agile, more nimble, and more productive than developers using “legacy” tools. In our customer base, we consistently see Rails developers as 5-8x more productive than developers using traditional tools. We agree with Lance Walley of Engine Yard that a downturn in traditional IT spending could actually be a boon for Rails projects and the development shops that bring them to market.

Second, Rails represents a low risk investment for the IT organization. The platform is open source (free) and the community behind it provides teams with an expanded network upon which they can call to help build and optimize the performance of their applications.

Finally, Rails is all about creating great Web apps, many of which are delivered via a SaaS (software as a service) business model—so IT shops don’t have to write big checks for infrastructure or applications. They can get much of what they need from specialized hosters, or via inexpensive hosting alternatives in the Cloud. And, subscription-based pricing models make it easier for customers to sign up while keeping their risk low.

So, we remain bullish about the opportunities for Rails development, even while our global leaders struggle to keep the financial wheels on the bus. What do you think?

FROM:http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/10/8/ruby-on-rails-opportunity-in-a-financial-downturn(Keeps Copyright)

How would you like to use your Ruby skills to make the world a better, healthier place?

Gyminee is the premier fitness social network for detailed tracking, online accountability, and motivation. We are built on top of Ruby on Rails, and we need another rockstar developer to join our team. The technology is fun, we have a lot to do, and you can use your code to make this world a better place. We are growing fast, and need a few more developers on our team.

We need someone that is creative, passionate, dependable, and likes being part of a small, rapidly-moving team. Our ideal candidate will have experience building web apps, an eye for good design, and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

Here is what we are looking for:

- You need to have extensive experience developing Ruby on Rails web apps.

- You need to be proficient with HTML, CSS, Javascript, cross browser compatibility (design skills are a plus)

- You should have the ability work in a small, geographically-distributed team using IM, voice chat, etc.

- You should have examples of web apps that you have built in the past and/or contributions to open source Ruby/Rails projects

- You should have experience with scaling rapidly-growing websites

- You should like Macs

Bonus points: You should be into fitness, working out, and healthy living. If you have also built native iPhone apps, you go to the top of our hire list.

From:http://www.virtualvocations.com/jobdetails/job/17192/home-based-ruby-on-rails-developer.html(Keeps Copyright)

Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications is an easy-to-follow, practical and fun guide to Ruby on Rails for beginners. It covers all you need to get up and running, from installing Ruby, Rails and MySQL to building and deploying a fully featured web application.

This book will show you how to install Ruby on Rails on Windows, Mac, or Linux,walk you, step by step, through the development of a Web 2.0 social news application, just like digg.com. But when i read it, it says you can operate in that huge way and you need to implement some caching features to really beat the digg website. It will show you how to test, debug, benchmark, and deploy your Rails application. I learned much from it and the first thing i tried was the “how to build an Ajax powered Flickr Photo Viewer app”.

Unlike other Rails books, this book doesn’t assume that you are an experienced web developer, or that you’ve used Ruby before. An entire chapter is devoted to learning Ruby in a fun way, using the interactive Ruby console, so you can follow along at home. You’ll be an accomplished Ruby programmer in no time!

This book focuses on the practical parts of Rails that you can use to build next-generation web applications, rather than the obscure features of Rails that no one uses. Learn how to:

• Interact with your database using ActiveRecord and migrations instead of arcane SQL commands.
• Add Ajax and visual effects to your application, using the built-in Prototype and script.aculo.us JavaScript libraries.
• Understand and use a model-view-controller architecture, maximizing code reuse and simplifying code maintenance.

The book uses Rails 1.2 - the very latest version of Rails - so you can take advantage of all of the latest features of the framework.

Packed with easy-to-understand instructions and sample code, Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications is the ultimate beginner’s guide to Ruby on Rails.

What is Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is a revolutionary web development framework designed to put the fun back into developing web applications. Read more about it on its website.

FROM:http://www.teckitech.com/books/build-your-own-ruby-on-rails-web-applications/ (IT Keeps the Copyright)

As a speaker at the upcoming AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo, I just received an email from Lindsay over at SYS-CON Events. She just informed me about the coupon code “spkrguestbootcamp” (lower case) that I can use to invite three guests with. I am not planning to bring anyone with me from Sydney, Australia, so here it is for you to take advantage of. The registration page can be found here.

Here is a list of speakers that I copied from the conference website.

AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo faculty alumni include such notable speakers as: Brad Abrams (Microsoft), Danny Allan (Watchfire), Jean-Francois Arcand (Sun Microsystems), Roland Barcia (IBM), Jeffrey Barr (Amazon), Robb Beal (Lazslo Systems), Sumeer Bhola (IBM), Robert Boedigheimer (The Schwan Food Company), David Boloker (IBM), Jeff Brown (G2One), Shane Bryzak (JBoss), Bob Buffone (Nexaweb), Kurt Cagle, Kord Campbell (Splunk), Max Carlson (Lazslo Systems), Marco Cassario (Adobe), Andre Charland (Nitobi), William Cava (Ektron), Frank Cohen (PushToTest), Lauren Cooney (IBM), Rod Cope (OpenLogic), Douglas Crockford (Yahoo), Jnan Dash (Curl), Andy Denmark (TripIt), Andrew Donoho (IBM), Jon Doyle (CommuniGate Systems), Andreas Ecker (1&1 Internet AG), Yakov Fain (Farata Systems), John Fallows (Kaazing), Jon Ferraiola (OpenAjax Alliance), Giuseppe Ferrigno (MomentumSI), Lou Fox (Blue Wolf), Anthony Franco (EffectiveUI), John Fronckowiak (IDC Consulting), Michael Galpin (eBay), Andrea Gazzaniga (Funambol), Evan Gerber (Molecular), Joshua Gertzen (ThinWire), Becky Gibson (IBM), Michael Girouard (Magnani Caruso Dutto), Paul Giurata (Catalyst Resources), Ted Goddard (ICEsoft), Sue Googe (Edream Solutions), Jeremy Grelle (SpringSource), Mike Grushin (SharpStyle Labs), Arun Gupta (Sun Microsystems), Andi Gutmans (Zend), Kevin Hakman (Aptana), Bert Halstead (Curl), James Harmon (Object Training Group), Jeff Haynie (Appcelerator), Mark Heid (IBM), Christian Heilmann (Yahoo), Billy Hoffman (HP), Kevin Hoffman, Kingsley Idehen (OpenLink Software), Jonas Jacobi (Kaazing), Dietrich Kappe (Pathfinder), Chris Keene (Wavemaker), Renat Khasanshyn (Apatar), Scott Kirkwood (MomentumSI), Peter Kirwan (Webmetrics), John Krahulec (ConceptSolutions), Senthil Krishnapillai (Sybase iAnywhere), Steve Maryka (ICEsoft), Mark McIlvane (Velocent Systems), Eric Miraglia (Yahoo), Stewart Nickolas (IBM), Peter Nickolov (3Tera), Emil Ong (Caucho Technology), Mike Padilla (Vanguard), Sriram Padmanabhan (IBM), Guy Peled (Gizmox), Adam Peller (IBM); Olivier Poupeney (DreamFace Interactive), Hooman Radfar (Clearspring), David Rapperport (Quest Diagnostics), Scott Regan (Sonoa Systems), Mark Ric (Kaazing), Asaf Saar (SAP Labs), Chris Schalk (Google), David Schlesinger (ACCESS), Joe Stagner (Microsoft), Jeff Tapper (Digital Primates IT Consulting Services), Shashank Tiwari (Saven Technologies), Ian Tomlin (NDMC), Lars Trieloff (Day Software), Rob Tweed (M/Gateway Developments), Coach Wei (Nexaweb), Matthias Wessendorf (Oracle), Chris Williams (Aptana), Dev Worah (Virtusa).

SYS-CON’s upcoming “6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo” faculty includes such distinguished speakers as: Brad Abrams (Mcirosoft), Christopher Allen (iPhoneWebDev.com), Jeffrey Barr (Amazon), David Boloker (IBM), Bob Buffone (Nexaweb), Max Carlson (Openlaszlo.org), Dave Carroll (Salesforce.com), William Cava (Ektron), Roberto Chinnici (Sun Microsystems), Jeremy Chone (Nexaweb), Douglas Crockford (Yahoo), Jnan Dash (Curl), Andy Denmark (TripIt), Ali Diab (AdMob), Jon Doyle (CommuniGate Systems), Jim Driscoll (Sun Microsystems), John Fallows (Kaazing), Eric Farrar (Sybase iAnywhere), Jon Ferraiolo (IBM), Marcus Franz (BF Blogform Search), Chuck Freedman (Ribbit), John Fronckowiak (IDC Consulting), Michael Galpin (eBay), Evan Gerber (Molecular), Michael Girouard (Magani Caruso Dutton), Dan Gisolfi (IBM), Ted Goddard (ICEsoft), Sue Googe (Edream Solutions), Laurie Gray (OneSpring), Jeremy Grelle (SpringSource), Mike Grushin (feedbackFX), Arun Gupta (Sun Microsystems), Scott Guthrie (Microsoft), Wesley Hales (JBoss/Red Hat), Brent Hamby (NextDB.net), Geoff Hendrey (NextDB.net), Michael Ho (Quasidea Developments), Billy Hoffman (HP), Pieter Humphrey (Oracle (BEA)), Kingsley Idehen (OpenLink Software), Jonas Jacobi (Kaazing), Christophe Jolif (ILOG), Yehuda Katz (EngineYard), Chris Keene (Wavemaker), Charles Kendrick (Isomorphic), Howard Kiewe (Info-Tech Research Group), Ed Kiraly (ILOG), Roger Kitain (Sun Microsystems), John Krahulec (Bizwhazee), Senthil Krishnapillai (Sybase iAnywhere), Chris Laffra (IBM), Peter Laird (Oracle), Jan Linden (Global IP Solutions), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Stephen Maryka (ICEsoft), Dave Meeker (Roundarch), Mark Meeker (Orbitz Worldwide), Ryan Moquin (BEA Systems), Greg Murray (Aptana), Guy Naor (Morph Labs), Kevin Nilson (E*Trade), Michael Oliver (Corent Technology), Adam Polansky (Travelocity), Matthew Quinlan (Appcelerator), Tatiana Nasser Rafique (SS & C Technologies), Juan Camilo Ruiz (Oracle Development Tools for JDeveloper/ADP), Ben Rushlo (Keynote Systems), Frank Salim (Kaazing), Chris Schalk (Google), Andy Schwartz (Oracle), Bill Scott (Yahoo), Ian Shelby (Gen X Design), Shay Shmeltzer (Oracle JDeveloper), Karthik Shyamsunder (VeriSign), Raghavan Srinivas (Sun Microsystems), Peter Svensson (Nethouse AB), Nicholas Thomas (Finicity), Rob Tweed (M/Gateway) Kirstan Vandersluis (XAware), James Ward (Adobe), Coach Wei (RazorSpeed LLC), Adrian Weisberg (Takuan Consulting), Bill Westerman (Create with Context), Elaine Wherry (Meebo) and Dev Worah (Virtusa).
The third video, “Applications of Human Language Technology,” is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts Franz Josef Och, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.

We hope to produce more of these, so please leave feedback at YouTube (in the comments field for each video), and we will incorporate your ideas into our future efforts.

REally funny ad…

I really enjoyed Akademy this year, and blagging a Nokia N810 right on the day of my birthday was one of the highlights of a great week. I’m very keen to port the QtRuby bindings to the N810 as it should make a nice development environment for quickly developing small free standing apps and Plasma applets. Instead of using Scratchbox, cross compiling on a laptop, and then downloading the binaries, I’ve been building on the device itself. I’ll summarize what I’ve done so far to get my tablet set up with dual booting OSs and native compilation.

The first step is to obtain root access and flash the latest OS - I got instructions for how to do that from a good introductory article Hacking the Nokia N810. Note that you can leave the device in production mode if you enable root by installing ‘becomeroot’. Use the http://gronmayer.com/it site to add all the repositories to your Application Manager app. After my first attempt to install openssh I ended up setting a root password that I couldn’t seem to type correctly again, in spite of typing it twice when I added it. So it is quite important to know how to re-flash with the flasher-3.0 tool as described on the Maemo Wiki. Download the latest OS .bin file, as well as the one that came on the tablet. There were a few improvements in the latest OS such as it now gets updates from the internet, and I’ve used that one. I installed bash2 as the busybox shell seemed to be lacking a few features which made it annoying to use (eg ‘!!’ for do last command). I downloaded and built gnu core utilities and just installed ‘ls’ at first, so I could have coloured file listings. Later I installed the whole thing as perl wouldn’t build without ‘comm’. The tar that came with the machine didn’t seem to work properly and I installed gnutar via a package. On FAT32, gnutar gives loads of permission errors, but it did seem to actually work.

Next I tried installing Ruby 1.8 and irb with apt-get as .deb packages, and that was nearly a good idea. Unfortunately irb doesn’t come with the ‘readline’ extension which makes it a bit broken as you can’t go back through your irb history. Also Ruby didn’t have any headers so you couldn’t build native extensions with it, and so I thought I’d attempt to build Ruby on the machine. I found instructions in HOWTO: C/C++ compiling on the unit itself about what to do with the apparently broken packages, and I did actually end up with a working compiler for both C and C++. Note that you need to manually add sym links for gcc-3.4 to gcc and g++-3.4 to g++. Later I found the perl was expecting the compiler to be called ‘cc’, and I created another sym link for that too. It doesn’t compile that fast compared with my laptop, but it isn’t bad. Looking at ‘top’ when compiling on the Nokia, g++ takes about 100% of the CPU and 25% of the memory and so as long as you don’t try to do anything else at the same time it works quite well. I installed make and cmake packages to go with the new compiler.

You need to install gnugrep before Ruby will configure, as the grep that comes with the busybox shell in the Nokia lacks features. The 2GB internal flash drive is formatted as FAT 32 and shell scripts with ‘#!/bin/sh’ didn’t work at first, so I added ‘exec’ to the line in the /etc/fstab for the mmc1 disk (normally the external one) and mounted it as that instead of mmc2.

Another problem was that you can’t create symbolic links on FAT file systems, which meant that building the Qt libs would be possible as they depend on it. The Ruby build expected to be able to create sym links to libruby.so from libruby-1.8.so, and so I worked round that by just copying the libraries. They were installed onto the root partition as proper sym links, and so it didn’t make any difference to the final result.

To get the Ruby readline extension to build I needed to download and build both ‘readline’ and ‘ncurses’, which seems like an awful lot of code just to get history navigation working. In theory there are .deb packages, but in practice the dependencies were broken for a lot of them, and building them myself seemed the safest option.

Finally I downloaded and built the ruby gem code from Rubyforge, and was in a position to install and build native Ruby extensions. So I installed rails, mongrel etc which worked fine, except that generating the ri and rdoc documentation seems to take forever. Maybe Ruby runs really slowly on the N810 - I haven’t done any benchmarks yet.

These are the .debs I installed to get the first root file system working well:

bash2_2.05b-1maemo2_armel.deb
bzip2_1.0.4-2maemo5_armel.deb
cmake_2.4.7-1mh1_armel.deb
cpp-3.4_3.4.4cs2005q3.2-5.osso8_armel.deb
g++-3.4_3.4.4cs2005q3.2-5.osso8_armel.deb
gcc-3.4_3.4.4cs2005q3.2-5.osso8_armel.deb
gnugrep_2.5.3_armel.deb
gnutar_1.20-1maemo4_armel.deb
libbz2-1.0_1.0.3-2_armel.deb
libc6-dev_2.5.0-1osso7_armel.deb
libc6_2.5.0-1osso7_armel.deb
libdb4.2_4.2.52+dfsg-2_armel.deb
libglade2-0_1%3a2.6.2-1indt1_armel.deb
libreadline4_4.3-10_armel.deb
libstdc++6-dev_3.4.4cs2005q3.2-5.osso8_armel.deb
libxml2_2.6.27.dfsg-1.maemo1_armel.deb
linux-kernel-headers_2.6.16.osso11-1_armel.deb
make_3.80-9osso_armel.deb
makedev_2.3.1-73osso-4_all.deb
wget_1.10.2-2osso2mg1_armel.deb
zlib1g-dev_1%3a1.2.3-9.osso8_armel.deb

At this point I decided I was fed up with FAT32 and non-functioning sym links, and found a couple of articles, here and here about how to reformat the file system and install a second root partition to allow dual booting. If you do exactly what they say you do indeed end up with a dual boot machine, and you hold the menu key down at start up to get to boot options menu. I formatted the internal drive as 500 Mb of FAT32, and 1500 Mb of ext2 (for the second root partition), and that works great with a lot more free space. You can use the original not too hacked internal flash as a back up, which you do more adventurous things on the second root partition. If something goes wrong you can mount the original root partition as read only and copy it across in exactly the same way as the second root partition image was created in the first place.

I bought a 4Gb mini SD for 26 euros to put the Qt, KDE and other sources on to get KDE4 built, and put it in the tablet’s external slot. I think it should be enough for kdelibs, kdebase and kdebindings at least.

To configure Qt you need a proper working perl, and the one that comes with the Nokia isn’t. You can’t just add extra perl modules as the dependencies were broken again and so I built Perl 5.8.8, after installing all of gnu core utilities with ‘comm’ that perl needed. Install pkg-config otherwise Qt won’t be able to find dbus. In fact I built the latest dbus, and found it needed the expat xml parser, which again didn’t have a working built package.

I’ve got as far as building QtCore, QtNetworking and QtXml, but have hit a problem with an X-Windows header used by QApplication which I need to look into. I’m quite optimistic though, and think I will end up with a pretty serious KDE development environment that I can put in my pocket - in no way is it a toy! I hope that in the future we can put together a pre-built Qt/KDE solution that will save all messing around needed at the moment..